5 ms·

> A few specialized miners form a complete graph. How "few" is few? What number of would you say is "too few" to count as an actual decentralized system? > Th

> A few specialized miners form a complete graph. How "few" is few? What number of would you say is "too few" to count as an actual decentralized system? > The majority of users use the SPV introduced in Chapter 8 of the Bitcoin white paper. Why? Why would people get themselves into a system that has none of the advantages of central systems (institutions with authority to correct human errors and some type of checks-and-balances) but will still require them to trust a handful of "specialized miners"? > Miners compete for their own incentives, processing hundreds of millions of TX. At what cost? And what kind of capital will be required for the operation to be profitable? Presumably these costs are not low, otherwise more people would be interested in joining the network and you wouldn't have "few specialized miners". How distributed are these miners going to be around the world? Given the amount of hashpower that is already concentrated in China, one would assume that these "few specialized miners" would be seeking places where energy can be cheaper and/or subsidized. How robust is a system that depends on geo-political factors? What happens when the cost of securing the network are just too big and China decides it is not worth it anymore and pulls the plug? If there are "few specialized miners", what's stopping them from colluding? If the competition is actually efficient and drives the prices down, the operation would be barely profitable. If the ROI is low, what would stop stopping from some bigger entity to just buy them out and keep them running? Doesn't that just give us the world's most expensive central bank? ---- Putting aside the cult-like obsession with Satoshi, the problem with maxis is that they assume always that their models (the "designs") are right and that people will change their behaviors and attitudes to fit into their model. Whoever continues to spew that BS after any kind of "one true way" is either incredibly naive or a pathological crook.

kylelee99 5y ago
SPV doesn't trust a handful of miners. Since SPV has block header information, it can verify itself.
kylelee99 5y ago
First of all, I thank you very much for your professional reply. Perhaps the biggest misconception about the Bitcoin network is that miners think they can change the rules. Satoshi's designed the Bitcoin protocol to be immutable. Therefore, miners only follow the rules according to their own interests. And it's the police who verify if other miners or users are breaking the rules. If they can't change the rules, there's no profit for some miners to collude. They can try to get in the way with money, but to no avail. In order to scale to a large scale, it is natural to specialize. ISPs are few in the world, but We are not saying they are centralized. This is because it only serves its role according to the Internet protocol. This is not an obsession with Satoshi. Since we are using what Satoshi made, we check whether it works by itself. Satoshi fixed the protocol, and I think he is right if scaling were made from the fixed rules. And the real expansion is taking place.
- rglullis 5y ago
  I have asked very specific questions, and you are responding with vague references to "the protocol" and very bad economic justifications for the feasibility of it all. > Bitcoin protocol to be immutable. The protocol doesn't matter for the purposes of these questions. The point is that your proposed architecture relies on a "few specialized miners". These miners (whether BTC, BCH or BSV) are few presumably due to the costs of running the operation profitably. PoW requires a lot of energy and blockspace requires ever more storage capacity - in the case of BSV, they would be requiring TBs of storage per week. > And it's the police who verify What police??? You just said before that miners can only act on their own interest, then you go to say there is someone that can force miners to do (or not do) something? > If they can't change the rules, there's no profit for some miners to collude. Like you said, in your design, they are few. If they are few, they can act as a cartel, which is effectively THE SAME as "changing the rules". They can collude to increase fees. They can collude to create periodic 51% attacks. They can collude to block transactions from certain addresses. > ISPs are few in the world, but We are not saying they are centralized. The cost to run one ISP is not dependent on how many other ISPs are out there. Its profitability may depend on market conditions and the market price may fluctuate due to increasing supply. But the operational costs are predictable and they grow slower than revenue. Also, it's very unlikely that once an ISP acquired a customer that they will be easily migrating to another that started offering better prices. Lastly, an ISP can use its servers for a long time, even if a newer/more powerful model comes to the market. Mining does not give you that. The cost to run a miner goes up with the amount of competition. Every one is competing for more hashpower and if you don't keep up in the race, your revenue is lost. People running outdated mining rigs will be priced out of the market or forced to buy newer/more efficient rigs. No amount of specialization and optimization will let you compete with a miner that is running on China with subsidized and/or dirty energy.
  - kylelee99 5y ago
    I'm trying to be as specific as possible. Bitcoin’s block reward converges to zero. Miners need incentives to existing. The TX fee, which will replace the block reward, exists only when the big block is processed. The cost of disk storage continues to drop. Miners do not necessarily need to store all data. Please refer to Chapter 7 of the White Paper. I expect that the service to store all data will be provided by another specialized company. Miners eliminate double-spending attacks according to their own interests. For this reason, I referred to as a police officer. What do you think are the benefits that a small number of miners can achieve by forming a cartel? Isn't it just an effort not to put a specific TX in a block? Or they reject blocks of honest miners. Competition from a handful of specialized honest miners prevents double-spending attacks. They handle larger TX with lower fees. This is a completely different form of storage from centralized data storage. Because you don't have to depend on anyone. All of this was what Satoshi expected. He designed Bitcoin like this. Thought Bitcoin as a Protocol set in stone for its lifetime “The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.” (June 17, 2010) Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 Predicted the emergence of server farms with specialized hardware “The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.” (July 29, 2010) Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 1MB block size limit should be temporary because it would never scale “Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it. The limit was originally Hal Finney's idea. Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn't scale at 1MB. Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed. The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched. But all 3 of us agreed that 1MB had to be temporary because it would never scale.” (Feb. 7, 2015) Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946236.msg10388435#msg10388435 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946236.msg10388435#m... Thought massive on-chain scaling would be possible at low cost, and now it is “Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices. If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.” (Nov. 3, 2008) Source: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/ Transactions will be processed within 10 seconds on snack machine “I believe it'll be possible for a payment processing company to provide as a service the rapid distribution of transactions with good-enough checking in something like 10 seconds or less.” (July 17, 2010) Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423
kylelee99 5y ago
Blocks of 1~2 GB size that are actually being mined have a higher fee than the current block reward. Miners can mine larger blocks to increase their ROI. I strive to provide sufficient answers to your questions. Please understand even if my English is not good.
- andelu 5y ago
  You are correct, and only BSV takes this seriously. Transaction fees taking over for block rewards are set out in the whitepaper. Section 6: Incentives... It explains block subsidy and tx fees including the purpose of both along with the transition plan...

kylelee99 5y ago

SPV doesn't trust a handful of miners. Since SPV has block header information, it can verify itself.

kylelee99 5y ago

First of all, I thank you very much for your professional reply. Perhaps the biggest misconception about the Bitcoin network is that miners think they can change the rules. Satoshi's designed the Bitcoin protocol to be immutable. Therefore, miners only follow the rules according to their own interests. And it's the police who verify if other miners or users are breaking the rules. If they can't change the rules, there's no profit for some miners to collude. They can try to get in the way with money, but to no avail. In order to scale to a large scale, it is natural to specialize. ISPs are few in the world, but We are not saying they are centralized. This is because it only serves its role according to the Internet protocol. This is not an obsession with Satoshi. Since we are using what Satoshi made, we check whether it works by itself. Satoshi fixed the protocol, and I think he is right if scaling were made from the fixed rules. And the real expansion is taking place.

rglullis 5y ago
I have asked very specific questions, and you are responding with vague references to "the protocol" and very bad economic justifications for the feasibility of it all. > Bitcoin protocol to be immutable. The protocol doesn't matter for the purposes of these questions. The point is that your proposed architecture relies on a "few specialized miners". These miners (whether BTC, BCH or BSV) are few presumably due to the costs of running the operation profitably. PoW requires a lot of energy and blockspace requires ever more storage capacity - in the case of BSV, they would be requiring TBs of storage per week. > And it's the police who verify What police??? You just said before that miners can only act on their own interest, then you go to say there is someone that can force miners to do (or not do) something? > If they can't change the rules, there's no profit for some miners to collude. Like you said, in your design, they are few. If they are few, they can act as a cartel, which is effectively THE SAME as "changing the rules". They can collude to increase fees. They can collude to create periodic 51% attacks. They can collude to block transactions from certain addresses. > ISPs are few in the world, but We are not saying they are centralized. The cost to run one ISP is not dependent on how many other ISPs are out there. Its profitability may depend on market conditions and the market price may fluctuate due to increasing supply. But the operational costs are predictable and they grow slower than revenue. Also, it's very unlikely that once an ISP acquired a customer that they will be easily migrating to another that started offering better prices. Lastly, an ISP can use its servers for a long time, even if a newer/more powerful model comes to the market. Mining does not give you that. The cost to run a miner goes up with the amount of competition. Every one is competing for more hashpower and if you don't keep up in the race, your revenue is lost. People running outdated mining rigs will be priced out of the market or forced to buy newer/more efficient rigs. No amount of specialization and optimization will let you compete with a miner that is running on China with subsidized and/or dirty energy.
- kylelee99 5y ago
  I'm trying to be as specific as possible. Bitcoin’s block reward converges to zero. Miners need incentives to existing. The TX fee, which will replace the block reward, exists only when the big block is processed. The cost of disk storage continues to drop. Miners do not necessarily need to store all data. Please refer to Chapter 7 of the White Paper. I expect that the service to store all data will be provided by another specialized company. Miners eliminate double-spending attacks according to their own interests. For this reason, I referred to as a police officer. What do you think are the benefits that a small number of miners can achieve by forming a cartel? Isn't it just an effort not to put a specific TX in a block? Or they reject blocks of honest miners. Competition from a handful of specialized honest miners prevents double-spending attacks. They handle larger TX with lower fees. This is a completely different form of storage from centralized data storage. Because you don't have to depend on anyone. All of this was what Satoshi expected. He designed Bitcoin like this. Thought Bitcoin as a Protocol set in stone for its lifetime “The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.” (June 17, 2010) Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611 Predicted the emergence of server farms with specialized hardware “The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.” (July 29, 2010) Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306 1MB block size limit should be temporary because it would never scale “Satoshi didn't have a 1MB limit in it. The limit was originally Hal Finney's idea. Both Satoshi and I objected that it wouldn't scale at 1MB. Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed. The 1MB limit was there by the time Bitcoin launched. But all 3 of us agreed that 1MB had to be temporary because it would never scale.” (Feb. 7, 2015) Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946236.msg10388435#msg10388435 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946236.msg10388435#m... Thought massive on-chain scaling would be possible at low cost, and now it is “Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices. If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.” (Nov. 3, 2008) Source: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/ Transactions will be processed within 10 seconds on snack machine “I believe it'll be possible for a payment processing company to provide as a service the rapid distribution of transactions with good-enough checking in something like 10 seconds or less.” (July 17, 2010) Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423

kylelee99 5y ago

Blocks of 1~2 GB size that are actually being mined have a higher fee than the current block reward. Miners can mine larger blocks to increase their ROI. I strive to provide sufficient answers to your questions. Please understand even if my English is not good.

andelu 5y ago
You are correct, and only BSV takes this seriously. Transaction fees taking over for block rewards are set out in the whitepaper. Section 6: Incentives... It explains block subsidy and tx fees including the purpose of both along with the transition plan...